Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) are a common tool for linking together content on the Internet. As social networks become increasingly popular, the number of URLs posted to social networks also increases. Where there is content, there is malicious content, and the number of malicious URLs posted to social networking platforms grows commensurately with their popularity. Users of social networking platforms may be particularly vulnerable to malicious URLs because of the trusted context that social networking platforms can create.
Unfortunately, traditional security systems may have difficulty determining whether a URL posted to a social networking platform may be malicious. Scanning web resources indicated by URLs may be resource intensive and may sometimes yield inaccurate. URL cloaking with link shorteners can make identifying unique URLs difficult. Blacklisting may prevent crawlers from gaining information about potentially malicious URLs. Many unique malicious URLs are posted exclusively to social networking platforms, rendering some traditional techniques that are not adapted for social networking platforms ineffective at identifying and classifying these malicious URLs. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for determining that uniform resource locators are malicious.